T. Boyle - Drop City

Inside, it was so close they had to sit yoga-style, their knees touching and their hands gone idle in their laps. But Pan, Pan got right to it, turning from the waist to dig out the pipe, the matches, the tinfoil, the hash and the razor blade, all of it kept close in a plastic baggie in the front pouch of his backpack. Merry said, “I love the sound of the river,” just to make conversation because conversation filled the void when people were preparing drugs for you, and Ronnie said something expected like, “Yeah, it's cool,” and he held the pipe out for her and lit a match. He watched her lips purse as she took in the smoke, watched the light settle in the rings on her fingers. They were in a cocoon, hidden away from the world, the skin of the tent lit up like the lens of a flashlight. Or a sausage. That's what it was. “I feel like we're inside a big orange Italian sausage, the hot kind,” he said, taking a hit and immediately feeding the pipe back to her because she was the one who needed to catch up- Her eyes watered. They swelled and fractured, and her cheeks distended with the effort to hold in the smoke that was always precious but never more so than out here under the bleached white sky of nowhere. Then she was coughing, hacking till her lungs were blistered and her lips flecked with spittle, and he was coughing too. “It never fails,” she gasped in a faltering little squeak of a voice that could have belonged to Maya, “because I think-it's my theory, anyway-that you get just as high from coughing as from the dope itself.”

Pan smiled. He agreed. Couldn't have agreed more. He hacked into his fist. After a moment he laid his hands on her thighs and began to work them back and forth with a soft tentative friction. “Music would be cool right now,” he said, just to say something, just to keep it going, and he thought of Lydia, back in the bus, cranking any record she felt like, and then he shook that thought right out of his head. “But you know, in some ways it's just as well that we don't have it, because we've got to _resensitize__ our ears to the environment, like the moose, the caribou, the wolves-you hear the _wolves__ last night?”

Her eyes were closed. She murmured something-yes, no, maybe-and then her eyes flashed open and she laid her hands atop his and guided them up her thighs. For a long moment they both looked down at their two pairs of hands working there against the hard lateral stitching of her jeans, pushing and kneading in concert, and then she leaned into him and kissed him. He heard the hiss of the river with his resensitized ears, felt the blood beating in his temples. And then he was pulling the T-shirt up over his head and fumbling with his belt and the black heavy load of the gun he kept strapped to his thigh like some TV gunslinger, like Matt Dillon or Johnny Yuma-he was a cowboy, how about that? — and she eased out her legs with an awkward rustle of the Creamsicle orange fabric of the tent and jerked her jeans and underpants down to her knees in a single motion. His hand went right to her and their mouths met again, and then- And then Jiminy was calling her name-“Merry! Merry?”-and his sodden Dingo boots were crunching in the gravel along the bank. “You out here? Merry?”

Pan froze. So did she. Jiminy couldn't see them, nobody could. The tent wasn't made of ultralightweight semitransparent Creamsicle-colored nylon-it was made of steel, steel lined with lead and with six inches of concrete on top of that. Pan was exploding. The buckle wouldn't give. He didn't dare move.

“Merry?”

The front flaps parted suddenly and the odd mosquito drifted in on the unfiltered glare of the night just as Jiminy's face hove into view, suspended there like a second sun. That was a moment, Pan caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, Merry's eyes anything but merry and Jiminy's face working itself through a whole catalogue of conflicting emotions, beginning with slap-faced shock and progressing through enlightenment to lust, grief and hate. The river coiled and uncoiled itself. The birds said nothing. And then, with the sound of a pebble dropped from on high into the deepest pool in the broad running length of the Yukon, Jiminy gave it one more try: “Merry?”

In the morning, Ronnie volunteered to take the boat downriver to pick up two of the bus people (they were working on the furlough system) and the eight hundred sixty-seven absolutely indispensable items of manufacture and trade without which Drop City North would cease to exist in short order-and that included building supplies, tools, candy, cigarettes, shampoo, sun lotion, potato chips and cheap paperbacks of any quality and on any subject, so long as they were in English. And the mail, don't forget the mail. Everybody gave him a list-Marco, Star, Reba, Bill and Premstar, even Jiminy (and that took some balls after what had come down last night). But that was all right. They were all brothers and sisters, no hard feelings, no grudges, Free Love in a free society. Pan collected money and wadded-up slips of paper and gave back assurances and disclaimers-“Sure, sure, if I can find it, sure, yeah.” He was the man of the hour and they all came to him, even Norm. (“Hard candy!” Norm roared, wading out into the river as he was about to shove off, and there wasn't a thing wrong with the engine a couple of dry spark plugs couldn't rectify, putt-putt-putt, _varoom.__ “The old-fashioned kind, with like butterscotch and cinnamon and whatnot. Get a big tin of it, ten pounds of it. Twenty. A hundred!”)

The only problem was Verbie. She was going with him, and no, he didn't need the company, didn't need anybody except maybe Lydia on the other end of the line with her legs spread wide, but Verbie's mother was in the hospital with some harrowing nightmare of a female cancer that was turning her insides to soup and Verbie had to phone home and lighten the load though she'd walked out the door three years ago and hadn't spoken to her mother since. There was no arguing with that. _Angela__ was staying. _Angela__ was going to give herself over to the needs of Drop City and stay behind to scrub pans, peel logs and whip up big cauldrons full of rice pap and mush three times a day, and she shared the same mother as Verbie-wasn't that sacrifice enough?

So at nine A.M., with the sound of sifting sand in his ears and the sun like a hot poker stabbed first in one eye and then the other-too much hash, too much of Tom Krishna's poisonous homebrew-Pan swung the bow of the skiff out into the current of the Thirtymile and headed downriver, Verbie perched in the middle of the seat in front of him for ballast. Unfortunately, she was _talking__ ballast, and before they even made Sess Harder's place she'd managed to change the subject six or eight times, moving without transition from the health benefits of ginseng to carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to mercury in tuna and the plight of the farm workers because the lettuce boycott just didn't go _far enough.__ Ronnie stared off past the sidewall of her face, the too-small eye, the sickle nose, the dark gap where the tooth was missing in front. She was talking over her shoulder like some sort of cockatoo, like a trained parrot that could twist its head round twice and never miss a beat. He wasn't listening. He was trying to focus on the country, on the joy of being here, the sun warm on his back and the breeze cool on his face, his eyes scanning the near shore for something to put a bullet through. Because that was his job, that was what he was doing here, no different from Sess Harder or Joe Bosky or any of the rest of them. And who was he? He was Pan, Pan of the North, and you could forget about Nanook.

Riding with the current, it was no more than fifteen minutes to Harder's place at the junction of the Thirtymile and the Yukon, and Ronnie spotted Sess and his old lady working a log into place where they were extending the cabin out along the flank of the river. He pulled the tiller-arm hard right and swung the boat in along the bank with the intention of asking Sess if he needed anything from town, common courtesy out here, the sort of thing anybody would do, but the fact was Ronnie used every excuse he could just to _talk__ to the man, to sit at his feet and pump him for information about pike holes and drift nets and the best way to smoke and press a duck.